


Reckoning

by still_intrepid



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crushes, F/F, F/M, Grieving, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-03-03 17:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13346070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_intrepid/pseuds/still_intrepid
Summary: A year on, I stand in front of the mirror sometimes and try to see the outer signs of any of this.  It's like a big bruise, this heartache that won’t go away, this pain from where someone's scratched AERIS over and over and over somewhere deep inside.Yuffie was more affected, of course she was, than most people got to see—and it didn't help that she'd never got the chance to be clear about her feelings about Aeris.  Even to herself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, I started this in *2005*, with the idea that "I just think maybe Yuffie would be affected a bit more seriously than we usually see.... and maybe, yes, it would take a while to settle in... and be an on and off thing, but seriously it could really damage her -- especially if she was really close to Aeris, and especially if she wasn't sure how close or exactly what their relationship was or what her feelings were, and no one else came close to seeing…" And now thirteen years later I dust it off and might actually finish it up; even if it's not plotty or containing much closure, just a vignette. 
> 
> It's been so long since I read Final Fantasy fic-- I am so thrilled that people in the meantime seem to have got with the Yuffie/Aeris and even Jessie/Aeris content I craved but never finished back in the day!! 
> 
> (This is without reference to anything that came after the original game...)

I hate anniversaries.  

There are the usual sort, which are only deadly boring.  There used to be a whole lot of them when I lived in Wutai.  There were always tons of people who were supposed to be related to me in some way or other, and everyone patted me on the head and said how I’d grown and talked condescendingly about my cats.  There were speeches and stuff.  And meals that went on for hours and hours that were either conducted in solemn silence or drunken stupors.  We were usually anniverserating something _really old and pointless_ too, like the 500th anniversary of Lord so-and-so crossing a river (I mean - _why?_ ), 100 years since some military victory (and about 20 since a bazillion defeats at ShinRa’s hands, only funnily enough no one ever commemorated those), 15 year wedding anniversary of my mom and dad.  I don’t remember that one too well, because my mom died the year after, and after that anniversaries started being huge awkward affairs about Comforting the Poor Child, and that was much worse.

It’s just the one year this time.  But the first year’s meant to be the hardest.

The thing is I don't think about her every single day now, because, you know, that's not what happens.  Not for me anyway.  You don't always get nightmares, you just get on with life and stuff, and everything's fine and bloody hilarious, and when you think of her you can think: oh, she would have loved today, or hey, she would have looked great in this dress, or whatever...  And you smile and it hurts a bit but it's ok.

But then every once and a while a day will pop up out of the blue when you even won't want to get out of bed.  You just want to stay there all day and cry and cry and I never cry and I do not know what the hell is _wrong_ with me.

And so anyway, I hardly need a day specially marked out to be reminded, do I?  I mean, sure, it's great to remember the good times, I guess, and it is great to see everyone again and...  And I still can't believe Tifa's audacity at arranging something like this, honestly.

I get so confused…

Maybe you can see why it’s easier for me to say "I hate anniversaries", even if that's not quite the truth.

\--

 _She_.  There was this woman back in Wutai, Ino, — I used to call her Aunty, but she wasn’t really — who always used to say: “ _Who’s she, the cat’s mother?_ ”  

\--

You could phrase it like: I tagged along because of Cloud, but I stayed for Aeris.  It sounds really simple put like that, but it’s so so far away from being simple, so just let me explain, here from the beginning.  Just shut up and listen and don’t ask why.

So I suppose we have to do the bits of the story I remember, which would be everything (or almost everything) that happened after I joined up with the saving-the-world-crew-to-be.  Or whatever you’d call it.  Neo-AVALANCHE, maybe; “Neo” because as far as I can see we were totally not the same as Barret’s little team.  (There was a seventeen-year-old girl who was really clever and loved blowing things up.  She always sounded cool to me.  Sometimes, I get to thinking about Barret’s ghosts.  He doesn’t talk about them much, but there seem to be an awful lot of them.)

I hadn't had friends in a while.  I thought I didn't need anyone.  I was a scrawny sixteen-year-old and I thought I was alright on my own and didn't need anyone.  Still am — scrawny, I mean, though it's totally all muscle.  But seventeen.  A year on, I stand in front of the mirror sometimes and stare and stare and try to see the outer signs of any of this.  

It's like a big bruise, this heartache that won’t go away, this pain from where someone's scratched _AERIS_ over and over and over somewhere deep inside.

Ugh.  I think it's stupid to think about people as symbols.  Because that way it's like we can think, _It's ok; she was MEANT to die_ , and I can't think that.  I don't work like that.  Maybe cos I'm selfish, I don't know.  Because _of course_ she's fine and happy and having a ball because what afterlife or cosmos or Lifestream or whatever wouldn't jump at the chance of letting Aeris in?  I'm totally not worried about that.  But I'm not alright.  It's like.  Even if she saved the world by dying, even if; that doesn't mean I have to be happy about the way it went down.

She's not just special because she's dead.  She was already like, the most important most special person in the world.  People'd say it was because of her Ancient-ness or whatever — I preferred to think it was her human-ness.   And doesn't that sound nice, only...  I mean she wasn't perfect.  Not by the world’s standards.  (Because, in another way, she was.  She absolutely was.)  She wasn't as _graceful_ as you'd expect, not always.  She always gave an impression of being light though, light enough to walk on water, especially when she took off those clumpy boots she wore.   Long legs and bare feet dangling as she chatted; she liked sitting high up on the edges of things.  She was also pretty darn graceless in those hilarious awkward attempts at flirting with Cloud, though I admit that broke my heart a bit sometimes.

I bet you think that sounds really weird, me mooning over both Cloud and Aeris.  Well it just happened.

I liked Cloud.  Or, OK, I like him.  But obviously that's dead in the water now (oh _God_ , Yuffie, what the hell.)  That's going nowhere, which is fine and dandy with me at this point.

And Aeris...  We all fell in love with her, I guess, even Tifa and you know that really wasn't meant to happen what with that bloody love triangle being bad enough already.

So Cloud's, like, hot, you know?  He's cute.  He's got the hair and the eyes and the muscle tone and occasionally _just occasionally_ he gets his head far enough out of his backside to be genuinely funny and a cool guy.  And he was keeping up this thing of Mr mean Ex-SOLDIER, Mako eyes and everything, and I'm a Wutai girl and that's the ultimate rebellion, forbidden fruit shit, and are crushes supposed to make you hate yourself?

I dunno what Aeris saw in him.  From what I've learnt lately, it might have just been she saw someone else.

Maybe I'm not being fair.  She's not a symbol and she wasn't an angel or anything; she was human and she fell in love with Cloud.  Okay.  So that made us rivals, right? 

Only…

Was there a 'moment'?  It's not as simple as that.  But there was this one time.

—

We were at an inn somewhere, one of those luxurious ones where we got a bunch of rooms and no one had to sleep on the floor.  

Somehow Aeris and I ended up sharing a room and somehow it turned into a sleepover style of thing.  And I think: we both of us had weird childhoods.  Disrupted, you know, to say the _least_.  I wanted someone to talk to about all that stuff, without ever realising that's what I wanted.  Maybe just maybe she did too.  Maybe she was like me in that small way.  

That wasn't even where it started.  It started with watching TV, and — and I can't believe this just saying it now: like, _cuddling on the sofa_.  I've never cuddled with someone on a sofa ever before or since.  I wouldn't know where to start.  But she had her arm around me and and I'd slipped down a little, and there we were, close and resting on each other's breathing bodies.  I wasn't paying attention to whatever was on, and I become conscious of that.  Conscious of letting my thoughts drift to Aeris' arms around me, how neatly and how warm we fit together.

And.  I'm really really not a _huggy_ kind of person.  Not much with the touching at _all_ , in fact.  And I'd hardly even realised it until I started tagging along with That Lot, and both Tifa and Aeris are all: _Night, Yuffie! hug hug!_   I just sort of stand there and don't know what to do.  

I mean, maybe it's partly cultural.  We're a lot more with the bowing where I come from.  

But here we are, and I'm feeling so, so honestly wonderful.  

I don't want to go, but I really really need the bathroom now so I whisper hoarsely: "back in a sec", untangle myself from her limbs and flee...

I leant against the bathroom door feeling sick and trembly all over.  I pull faces at myself in the mirror, "BLAAAAA", and think how I look ugly, ugly, ugly.

When I get back, the TV’s switched off and she's changed into her night things and she’s sitting on the bed with her hair all loose and wavy and incredible around her.  I don't know if she got how this made me feel.  I mean I certainly didn't.  She just picked up the threads of a conversation from earlier as if nothing had happened.  It would be neat maybe to say we were drunk or something but seriously — Aeris drunk?  Yeah right, I can really see that happening.  (I wish I _could_ have got to see it happen.)  But something about her made me say things, admit things.  We talk about my home, and she _understands_ , I just know it.  She makes you remember things, feel things.  Things like shame, things I don't feel usually at all.  Sometimes — there's times and you have to realise she really is something else.  Her eyes had this blazing, "I-promise" sort of look in them and —

And I didn't believe in the Cause, not at first.  (And Aeris should hate me for that, not that she ever _would_.)  I believed in _her_ and that was all, though then again what on earth is "believe in" supposed to mean anyway?   I didn't know.  I didn’t care.  All I knew - absolutely, no question about it - was that I'd die for her if I could.  

And so I guess that's when it began for real: the Secret Adoration of Aeris Gainsbourough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter at last! 
> 
> Although... this now probably isn't the "ending", I'm upping the potential chapter count to three.
> 
> I haven't tagged Cloud/Yuffie because there's nothing like a (romantic) relationship, but there is an... incident, in this one.

Fast-forwarding a bit.  We went to the Golden Saucer, which was fun and great and cool and wicked and everything in itself, but it’s all mixed up in my head.  With — other things, you know? It’s complicated. 

On the outside maybe not a lot had changed, with me.  I mean: no, it hadn't.  I was still annoying to the max.  That's a hard habit to break and sometimes I backslid in a fairly major way just because I was freaking myself out — or maybe the rest of them were taking themselves too totally seriously anyway.  But inside I was… trying to try?  Thinking about stuff.  Just a bit.  

Anyway.  That first night there was no way I was getting to sleep.  Because 1. I was mad hyper, possibly because I’d eaten about a ton of candy floss, and 2. there was this plastic ghost type thing that appeared periodically outside my window and went “WHOOO”.  Finally I decided to wait by the window and bash it over the head with something the next time it appeared.  Then I saw the lights of the park down the hill and I thought, _What the hell am I doing in bed anyway?_

I danced around, finding clothes and stuff from where I’d thrown them on the floor earlier, and started planning out in my head where I was going to go first, and all the time this wonderful, happy feeling of night-time wakefulness was swelling up inside.

Then I thought I should ask Aeris to come with, so I sneaked off down the corridor towards her room, all quiet and ninja-like.  But when I got to the door of her room I found I couldn’t knock.   

It wasn’t like I minded waking her or being rude or something.  Actually, I was thinking about waking everyone up — if-I-can’t-sleep-why-should-anyone-else sort of thing.  Then I thought about getting blown to bits by Barret’s gun arm and that was the end of _that_ idea. 

But this was something else.  I stood there in the velvet-and-mirror-lined corridor for ages, debating with myself and feeling the balloon of happy inside me slowly deflating.  _Why not?_ I whispered viciously to mirror-me, _Just as friends, what’s the problem?_

The rest of the happy-balloon shrivelled up weirdly in my stomach.  The problem was that there was a question at all.  I’d only gone and said it out loud and everything.

So in the end I dragged Cloud out instead.  That was easy.  Like, _intensely_  awkward and idiotic, but easy as pie. 

\---

Fast-forward again.  Just a little.

No.  

Yes.  No.  I don’t want to.

(But the psychology book tells me negative suggestions like “I won’t think about it”  are no good, because your mind will always focus on what you’re trying not to do.)

 ---

The City of the Ancients.

There’s no way out now.  I mean, I don’t know why we didn’t see it at the time.  This place, this beautiful, shining place, shot through with water-shadows... This place is a death trap.  But ohh no, it was all: oh, look, a weird swirly stone thing: isn’t the architecture nice here?  Smile smile smile everything will be fine.  Bloody _hell_.

Of course we saw it.  Thing is, we didn’t know what we were seeing.  All the smiles and all the total crap — we're just in just denial, but even as we’re walking down that staircase we still have no idea what we’re denying.

I’m doing the casting-furtive-glances-behind-me thing.  I don’t know what’s going on and something must be wrong because I'm scared not angry and I’m supposed to get angry...

Finally, down a cascade of stone steps, we see Aeris.  She’s alright.  She’s just kneeling — praying, I suppose.  

Praying.  I’m unnerved enough as it is.

(She'd _taken all her stuff with her_ , that was the thing.  Not all her materia or stuff anyone else could use but as many of _her_ things as she could carry.  I figured later, maybe she'd thrown everything into the water, or buried it.  So that we wouldn't have to.  I think she would have thought like that.  But sometimes, I still wish I had something else of hers. )

Cloud starts to run down towards her, calling her name.  And yeah, there’s a second when, through the relief, I feel something else, and my throat tightens a bit and I almost start to run after him.  But Tifa puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Let him go,” she says, real quiet.  And I remember for a second how much pain she has to be carrying around too.

I let him go first.  I could have caught up easily if I tried, I think to myself.  Then I think, well what good would that be anyway?  Let Cloud be the one to interrupt her special praying session or whatever if he really wants to. 

The rest of us follow up behind, walking softly.

Aeris looks very calm — very _graceful_ , yes — statuesque... 

Cloud stands there frozen too, looking at Aeris I suppose, but his back’s to us so I can’t see his face.  World-of-their-own.

But I can see Aeris’ face.  She’s looking at Cloud — or maybe at us, it’s hard to tell.  She’s so serene now, so poised...  And stern.  Wide, light eyes in her pale pale face.  Like green glass, rippling with the water-shadows and blazing with something else.  Like “I-promise” again.  Like she knew.

And I am so afraid.

And then, then it's like: what the hell Cloud?  No seriously what are you _doing_?! And for a moment we're all frozen solid like ice sculptures and I don't even think anyone was breathing.  Do you yell in panic or are you terrified if you startle him he could just move accidentally and —

Barret got through to him first and just wrestled him away.  The man had no fear.

Cloud's sword falls onto the floor, clatter clatter clatter.  And then—

And after that there's the part I really can't remember properly.  

I know what happened, but I can't _remember_. It's like the sound goes off in my head.  There are sounds, sounds that I know there should have been, but I did not hear them.  Sephiroth’s cloak cracking in the air... landing heavily... tearing linen... and...  And maybe she really made no sound at all. 

I screamed and screamed and didn't realise til later that I was screaming.

We fight then, but who the hell cares, we were always fighting.  _I promised myself I'd die for her_ , and look what happened.

And then I do the only thing I feel like I've done right all day and collapse into Cloud's chest and cry my heart out.  (I don't cry.  I never cry.  I didn't think like this at the time but now I think it was good because — I did cry.  At least I could say I'm not that much of a freak.)

And then Cloud bears the burden for all of us, wades into the water and lets her—her _body_ be taken by it, away from us forever.

We must have moved, walked somewhere. There must have been all these steps and narrow ledges I remember from the way there but I'm just crying the whole time.  I couldn't seem to stop.  I felt like I was quietly bleeding to death.

The other thing is I'm shaking and shaking.  And all of a sudden Vincent's walking by me and putting his cloak around my shoulders.  And this is _Vincent_ who I've hardly ever spoken to let alone touched and here he is, Vincent Valentine, all secrets and chivalry and dark-rose eyes that I can’t look at without crying even harder.  He didn’t say anything.  And I couldn't.  I was just thinking, _Why.  Why oh why now, why NOW do we love and care so much when it's too late for her forever? Why are we living and breathing and heaving great sobs of air into our lungs when…_

— 

Well.   It's understandable, to feel that way, isn't it?  And I don't need the books I've been reading now to explain that I was in shock, of course I was.  The numbness that came for a bit, later on the other side of despair, was a relief.

—

We all did a lot of stupid things that next week. 

We snapped at each other.  We burnt food.  We fell asleep on watch.  Tifa slipped and almost broke her ankle and Barret cussed her out for not being more careful, and she burst into tears, and then _he_ almost did too, repeating over and over "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry" and he hugged her tight for what felt like ages.  I guess they were pretty much each other's oldest friend by now after all, apart from that childhood friends thing she had going with Cloud. 

And one night when I couldn’t sleep, I walked over to Cloud’s tent, and he kissed me until my head felt light and I ached inside.

…so, Not-Aunty Ino had a big shelf of these really trashy romance stories.  I read a few of them, when I was about twelve; or at least I flicked through them, looking for the rude bits.  Anyway, they’re crocks of shit, which I guess you know.  But case in point here: while it’s true that after a traumatic experience — after a _death_ —  you may be a lot readier to jump into bed or whatever with someone, it’s a total lie that it makes either of you feel any better afterwards.  Me and Cloud couldn’t help each other. 

That first kiss was all the passion and all the not-thinking anyone could want.  It never happened again. 

Sometimes I wish I could switch off my brain for a bit — or, not really, I'd die… but then again…  

Sometimes I wish I could be as vacant as people think I am but I can't shut it up.  My brain.  Always ticking away.

—Cloud kisses me again, but the distance is wrong, we’re too far apart.  I’m in his arms somehow but I feel overbalanced and like I’m going to fall over.  _And all the while I keep thinking how we don’t fit together right, and I keep thinking how there’s heat but no warmth, and I keep thinking about Aeris._

(It’s not until much later that I wonder whether Cloud was thinking the same kind of thing.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope I can write another chapter to round this off...! I always intended to get a little farther than this, but it's been much harder continuing that I expected. Still, got this section done, including ahh possibly the scene I was most afraid of writing of course :(


End file.
